Some of you are probably double-checking your calender right now, scratching your head feeling confused and thinking: "Isn't this update a bit soon for his doings, am I dreaming?" Make no mistake about it, this is real life. If it's necessary, pour a bucket of ice cold water over your head if you don't believe me. Make sure the water is freezing for full effect. I'll wait and don't forget to record it so we can all enjoy......
.......Are you done? Great! Now, first dry yourself before continuing your way onto the world wide web because I wouldn't want you to ruin your keyboard with those wet hands. I just post a bit sooner because I'm leaving for a small trip to London for the next couple of days and wanted to give you something to read in the meantime. Right, now we are all set, I'd like to show you a bit how "professional" I'm making these small animations of the last few weeks. First I was doubting if I should let my secrets known, but knowledgde is power they say and considering I lack a lust for power I decided to give the knowledge to the people. It may surprise you but the creation proces is really as amateur it can get I'm afraid, but I'm willing to give you an insight for your amusement.
The drawings are made on A4 paper so it looks like this:
If the background won't have any movement in it I use a black marker around the outlines to make them more obvious. If an object or character is planned to move in front of something in the background I just use a pencil so it can be erased and redrawn easily. Unfortunately, it's difficult to completely erase every step in the animation so you always see the previous poses, like here:
I could of course press a little more gentle on my pencil but then you would hardly see the drawings. If you have a Wacom tablet, you wouldn't have these problems obviously. Once the background and pose is done, it's time to take a picture. It was a bit trail and error to set it up but the end result looks like what you see below. Yep, just some books and stuff and a flashlight.
At first I just thought of simply using sunlight but the light always changes, clouds, time of day, so then I tried to use my chamberlights. The problem was that they send out a yellow-ish coulour that's even more obvious in pictures. I then remembered I have a LED-flashlight that emits white light so used that instead, but it can only been seen in a dark environment so that's why the movies are so underlit. In a way, the darkness fits the atmosphere of the movies so it's a positive side effect. But even using the flashligth, you see the light have different levels of brightness in the movies, that's the result of the batteries losing power sometimes......
In the end, about 140 drawings were made spread over 17 scenes. A scene counts as a new drawn background. Here you see a few different scenes together:
When all of the drawing and picture taking is finished, the editing begins. That's actualy the most fun part of it to me, you can also see the animation coming together. The drawing is more of a grind. It's also the time to choose a fitting soundtrack, but that's not much of a problem because I have a lot of this experimental and ambient music on my Itunes. I am planning to make a version of Midnight Dreamer with ambient sounds I made myself and maybe I can post it in the next update. The animated short in editing fase looks like this:
Here I can make some images overlap or fade out, to have a better continuation effect. It's all really basic stuff. Et voila, now you know how these were made. If in the next year you see movies of Pixar and Disney using afwully familiar techniques you know where they got their "inspiration". Spread the word.
Talking about familiar things, you should know Valerie June. This American singer/songwriter of Memphis Tennessee had her breakthrough this year with the great album "Pushin' Against a Stone". For me, it's one of the better albums of 2013 along with London Grammars "If You Wait" among other things. I'll let you listen to "On My Way" but the whole album is worth a listen honestly.
And now just shut up and enjoy.
Valerie June - On My Way
